by Jenny Colgan
And she was gone, and the two of us were alone.
I cleared my throat nervously. I was due to be talking today.
‘Well!’ I said, feeling completely idiotic. ‘Hello, Addison. It’s Holly here!’
Unsurprisingly, he didn’t stir.
‘And I just want you to know how very sorry I am about what happened down at the riverside. But we’re going to have to put all that behind us and concentrate on getting you well again, then the next time we kiss it can be … down a coal mine or something. If you want to kiss me again. Which you probably won’t. And of course you’d be quite within your rights to feel that way.’
Oh no. This was all going a bit downbeat. I tried desperately to think of some good news.
‘So, anyway, Chali sends her love. You’ve never met, but I’m sure you’d get on. Well, OK, so not get on, as such, at all, but you know, she’s a person I know and you’re a person I know and, well, she sent her love. Though not, as such.’
This was proving harder than it looked. I remembered back to old documentaries about people in comas. Wasn’t I supposed to put stereo headphones on him and play lots of Cliff Richard records? But hadn’t I hurt the poor guy enough?
‘Ehm … oooh, and the big news of the day is that Josh has been invited out by a bloke. And he said yes! Which, as you know, comes only two days after him sleeping with a woman. So that’s pretty exciting for us – we might be able to categorize Josh once and for all. But he’s a bit scared and stockpiling lots of Vaseline products –’
‘Is that true?’ said a bleached blond head sticking through the curtains. It was the male nurse.
‘You can’t be supposed to listen to people talking to coma victims!’ I said, annoyed. ‘Anyway, I thought you worked downstairs.’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘I came to check on your friend here.’
‘Uh huh?’ I said suspiciously.
‘And see if he had any visitors.’
‘He does,’ I said. ‘Me.’
‘So I see. Hi … I’m Stephen.’
‘Hello, Stephen. I’m Holly.’
‘Yes, I know all about you,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling that horribly disconcerted way you do when you drank too much tequila at a party and spoke to someone for ages and they come up and say hello the next day and you can’t remember who they are. ‘Well …’ I said.
‘But never mind about that. Tell me more about that yummy flatmate of yours.’
He was the first person I’d met in the last twenty-four hours who didn’t think I was evil, so I was perhaps more willing to confide in him than I might otherwise have been.
‘Josh is very sweet and a bit undecided.’
‘Really?’ he pouted. ‘I prefer it if they’re straight.’
‘Well, you know, he probably is. He slept with a girl just this week.’
‘Huh.’
‘But he did agree to go out with you, didn’t he?’
Stephen smiled shyly.
‘Don’t take him anywhere scary,’ I warned. ‘He’s very innocent. Don’t take him anywhere he has to put on a harness, or dance around in his underpants.’
‘I thought I’d take him to dinner,’ said Stephen. ‘Is that OK, or do you have to write him a note?’
I smiled. ‘OK. How’s Addison doing?’
‘Is he your boyfriend?’
‘Kind of.’
‘He’s cute.’
‘Isn’t he?’ We looked at him for a bit.
‘He’s going to be OK, isn’t he?’
‘I’m sure of it,’ said Stephen, getting up to go.
‘IS HE HERE?’ The curtain was pulled back with indecent haste, and the greasy doctor stormed in, rushing over to the bed and bending over Addison’s head. ‘STEPHEN, GET ME A SPATULA, STAT!’
‘What? What is it?’ I jumped up, horrified. The doc shot me a dirty look. ‘Could you step outside for a second, please.’
‘Why, what’s the matter?’
Stephen returned, out of breath, with a small piece of plastic.
‘I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s the matter,’ I shrieked.
‘You can stay,’ Stephen said, coming round behind the doctor, who shot him a dirty look too.
‘OK,’ she said, slapping on a pair of unsavoury plastic gloves. Slowly, she prised open one of Addison’s eyes and shone a light into it.
‘What’s she doing?’ I hissed to Stephen. He shrugged his shoulders. That did not instil a sense of confidence.
The doc turned to me. ‘What’s his refraction index?’
‘Duh huh huh?’ I dribbled. What was she talking about? What was going to happen if I didn’t know?
‘I can’t see anything,’ she said to Stephen, ‘can you?’ He leaned over.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘It says on his chart that he’s extremely short-sighted. Dr Costello thinks he may still have his contact lenses in.’
She leaned back off the bed, slightly shame-facedly.
‘I didn’t … see them yesterday.’
I picked up Addison’s glasses, which were lying by his bed.
‘He wears these.’
‘Right, right, of course, I knew that. Just checking. OK. Ehmm. All clear.’
She tore off the gloves dramatically, then disappeared.
‘What was that?’
Stephen shrugged. ‘If you forget to take out someone’s contact lenses and they’re unconscious for a long time, the eyes get oxygen starvation and they can, you know, rot.’
‘WHAT?’
‘But it’s OK.’
‘Dr Hitler tried to blind my boyfriend and you are telling me it’s OK?’
‘Hey, you know, she caught it.’
‘He could have worms coming out of his eyes!’
‘Ehm, don’t forget he may be able to hear you.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’
I sat back down beside him.
‘I have to go.’
‘I know. I’ll say hi to Josh for you.’
‘Cheers.’
‘Oh, Add,’ I said, when he’d gone. I put my head on his shoulder. He smelled of starch, and hospital beds. ‘It’s not easy self-sacrificing myself for you, you know. What if they’ve forgotten something else? I’m not going to know what it is, am I?’
My fingers idly tapped out a rhythm on his.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘this is worse than the time I went to meet that guy who I thought looked like Andrew Ridgeley and I tripped up at the railway station and nearly fell on the track and that guy caught me and I broke my big toe. Still, at least it was me that got hurt. And, you know, it’s not fair if you have only just woken up to life and everything and you get it whisked from under you. And if that’s the case and there is a God then he’s a SKANKY OLD MAN.’
I said this last bit a little louder than I intended, because all of a sudden this rasping voice came: ‘No I’m not!’
I jumped five feet, yelled, ‘Fucking hell!’ and looked all around, in case it was God.
‘Is that God?’
‘Yes,’ rasped the voice. It appeared to be coming from somewhere to my left. I peered out from behind the curtain. In the next bed along was an old, old man who looked very sick indeed. He was hooked up to a ventilator. I went over to him.
‘You’re not God.’
‘Close enough,’ he wheezed. ‘He’s on his way.’
‘Huh.’ I pondered for a bit. ‘You are a skanky old man though.’
‘That’s true. But on the inside, I’m divine.’
‘Cool. A man said that to me once.’
He laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant sound.
‘So, can you help my friend Addison?’ I said eagerly. Any port in a storm.
‘Unfortunately, I move in mysterious ways.’
‘Is that a maybe?’
‘Harrumph. Yes. It’s a maybe. Now, could you put some whisky down my feeding tube?’
‘I don’t think that sounds very
safe.’
‘I’m God, you idiot. I’ll be fine.’
‘Mr McClockerty! Are you talking again?’ Dr Hitler arrived out of nowhere. She eyed me with her standard look of suspicion tinted with hatred. ‘Please don’t speak to the other patients. It’s not good for them.’
‘She wasn’t talking, nurse, she was praying.’
‘I’m not a nurse, I’m a doctor. And it’s time for your medicine. And you can have a big vein or a small vein – it’s your choice.’
The old man sighed and lapsed into silence.
‘I’ll just get back to Addison,’ I said, more crawlingly than I’d intended.
‘You do that,’ she said, in the same crawly tone of voice.
Inside the cubicle I sighed, and experimented to see whether I could actually sit on the bed, but there wasn’t space and I was terrified of disrupting a tube, like in that Airplane film, so I settled for dragging over the low and uncomfortable hospital stool and leaning over it, resting my chin on the bed. And for want of anything better to talk about, I told Addison about the time I’d shared a flat with a so-called terrorist who’d decided to go on dirty protest.
Around seven thirty, Josh turned up, looking even more dapper than usual – I couldn’t work out what it was until I realized he was wearing a cravat.
‘Did I miss the waking up?’ he said eagerly.
‘No.’
‘Great! I mean, oh.’
He came and stood by the bed and made as if to touch Addison, but didn’t, of course, being English and male.
‘No change then.’
‘Not in him,’ I said. ‘You, however, appear to be wearing a cravat.’
‘Ah. Yes. Well, you saw the schedule, didn’t you?’
‘Uh huh. I hate schedules.’
‘Well, it’s time for me to …’
It dawned on me…
‘No.’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘It might make him worse.’
He turned to me stiffly.
‘Arthur Sullivan and the great W. S. Gilbert have never in the history of the world been known to make someone feel worse.’
‘Now, Josh, you know that’s not true. What about that production you were in of HMS Pinafore when that guy in the audience pretended to faint and got carried out on a stretcher and fell off the stretcher and twisted his knee?’
‘He didn’t pretend to faint.’
‘He limped into Casualty screaming, “It was worth it to get me out of there!”’
‘Well. Anyway. It was on the rota.’
I sighed. Josh cleared his throat.
‘Sing it quietly at least,’ I said. ‘Dr Hitler will probably get your neck amputated if she hears you.’
‘Well, music can soothe the savage brow.’
‘Yes, music can,’ I said, sitting down disgruntledly in the corner chair. ‘Not whatever it is you do.’
In fact, Josh had an exceptionally pleasant baritone voice, but it didn’t stop me sitting there making ‘rumpety pumpety rumpety pumpety’ noises in the background as he sang from the ‘Major-General’s Song’.
I humoured him by singing a line for him.
‘Thank you,’ said Josh. ‘Do you think it’s working?’
‘I had hoped’, I said, ‘that he would have gotten up now, just to point out how terrible your singing voice is.’
‘Another verse might help,’ said Josh, carrying on with the next few lines while I joined in.
We both took a peek at Addison. It didn’t seem to be working.
‘That’s God’s music!’ shouted a voice from the next bed. I stuck my head out of the curtains.
‘That’s not God’s music! Hymns are God’s music!’
‘God’s music is whatever I say it is,’ hacked God. ‘Which today means it’s Gilbert & Sullivan. And Climie/Fisher.’
‘You are truly a wrathful God,’ I said.
‘I know. Now, tell him to sing again before I turn you into a bush.’
Josh raised his eyebrows, but one of his uncles thinks he’s the Duke of Wellington, so he’s pretty used to it.
‘Ehm …’ He carried on singing, somehow knowing all the lyrics to the song.
‘This is all nonsense,’ I grumbled. ‘And how come you can remember this rubbish and not your pin number?’
‘Look, Holl, I thought this would be the best thing for someone as brainy as Addison so I spent all day learning it, OK?’ said Josh hotly.
‘OK, OK, I’m sorry.’ The nurses had come and joined us from the nurses’ station and seemed to be enjoying it.
‘I forgive you,’ came the rasp from next door, joining me in singing.
Josh looked strained. ‘I can’t remember the final verse though.’
‘OK, we’ll do that last bit again.’
And Josh and I stood, and God raised an ageing hand, and the nurses joined in and we all chorused the last verse.
Josh gave a smart military bow.
‘WHAT is going on in here?’ screeched Dr Hitler, pounding up the ward. The nurses scattered like pigeons in the road, leaving us staring guiltily at the floor.
‘Uhm … apparently music is good for helping … uhm … you know …’ Josh was trying on his best Hugh Grant, but he didn’t appear to be getting anywhere.
‘Yes, through headphones. This is just plain disruptive. Was Mr McClockerty involved?’
‘Ooh no … God – I mean, Mr McClockerty warned us against it.’
‘She speaks the truth,’ came the voice.
‘But we did it anyway,’ I concluded, shooting an evil glance next door, then concentrating on the floor.
‘Oh, but, Doctor,’ said Josh, gazing at her imploringly. He came up opposite her and took both her hands.
He started, very softly, to serenade her.
Amazingly, Dr Hitler started to giggle and blush. Maybe Josh was right about Gilbert and Sullivan after all. The nurses started to creep back out of their holes to watch the bizarre spectacle.
There was a round of applause. Dr Hitler coloured and looked away.
‘That’s as may be,’ she said finally. ‘But –’
‘Doctor!’ shouted one of the nurses at one of the far beds. ‘Come over here! It’s Grant! I think he’s moving!’
Josh and I stared at each other as the entire ward staff threw itself to the other side of the room.
‘Fucking hell!’ we said in unison and raced over to have a look. A nineteen-year-old was lying on the bed, blinking in the daylight with an extremely confused expression.
‘First motorbike,’ said one of the nurses to us in a hushed voice. ‘When they sell them to young guys they just put a long bit of elastic on the back so that when the boys fall off them five minutes later, they come right back to the garage.’
‘Gosh, really?’ said Josh, not concentrating. The curtain was swiftly drawn round, however, and we were forced back.
‘I’ve done it again,’ said God.
‘Have you really?’ I said. ‘We reckon it was Josh’s singing, and we just need to find the right song for Addison.’
‘And anyway,’ said Josh, ‘why did you put him in here in the first place?’
‘Mysterious –’
‘– ways. Yes, we know.’
God stared at us wistfully.
‘Do you know how you could best please God whilst the nurses aren’t looking?’
‘Sponge bath?’ I said.
‘The whisky’s in the cabinet,’ he said. ‘Just pour it down this tube here. Not this one, or I’ll choke to death on the stuff. What a way to go though.’ He hacked strenuously at the idea.
‘Nuh huh,’ I said. ‘I am in enough trouble already just on bed number four.’
He nodded.
‘I know.’
‘Yes, well, you’re omniscient, aren’t you?’
Addison’s mother came back into the ward.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep in the doctors’ canteen. It was so full of doctors sleeping.’
‘Don’t worry about it at all. Really, you know, he was no trouble.’
She looked at her son.
‘I always wish he were more trouble.’
‘I know what you mean.’
She sat down and cupped his head. ‘You can go now,’ she said quietly.
‘We’ll be back tomorrow,’ I said.
She nodded, and we crept away.
Kate met us at the door as we trooped in.
‘Well done, chaps,’ she said. ‘Did you sing?’
Josh nodded.
‘We’re pretty much on schedule then. And I made dinner.’
Josh and I glanced at each other suspiciously. There wasn’t any smell of food. I wasn’t allowed near a stove, but Kate was pretty much an unknown quantity. I suspected sliced raw green things. Bugger it.
‘Here we go.’
In the kitchen was an enormous pile of boxes from Marks & Spencer. There was chicken in port wine, squash, confit, bananas and gravy, and pork in mustard, cumin, champagne and figs, as well as a box with julienne carrots in it, and a box full of mashed potatoes which had cost a couple of quid. Josh was practically speechless.
‘Choose away.’
‘Kate, this isn’t food.’
‘It better be; it cost me more than dinner at Bank.’
Josh picked up the various boxes as if they were active jellyfish.
‘I don’t think I can eat this.’
‘But I went to so much trouble!’
‘You went to Marks & Spencer!’
‘That’s trouble! Have you ever seen it at six thirty in the evening? I could have been killed!’
‘OK, calm down,’ I said. ‘At least we’re not eating through tubes.’
‘I’d rather have this through a tube,’ said Josh sullenly. ‘At least it could bypass my taste buds.’
‘Kate, I don’t mind. I’ll eat anything. Thanks for getting it.’
‘Don’t bother yourself,’ she said huffily, and stormed out.
‘See?’ I said to Josh. ‘As if today hasn’t been hard enough. Don’t upset Kate. That’s my job.’
‘I didn’t mean to upset her,’ he said, putting his apron on. ‘I was only teasing.’
‘You know Kate doesn’t take teasing very well from you,’ I scolded. He looked immediately penitent.
‘Skates!’ he hollered through the door. ‘I need you to help me chop things. Come here immediately.’
Amazingly, she came back in, slightly red in the face.